When we launched mLab in 2011 we were one of the first companies to offer a Database-as-a-Service.

The value proposition to developers was simple and powerful. Instead of self-hosting and managing what is arguably the most complex and difficult-to-manage layer of the application stack (the database), developers could use a cloud service for this critical piece of infrastructure. By doing so, developers could focus on their applications because the provisioning, scaling, backup, monitoring, and management of their databases was taken care of.

As interesting as the delivery model was the database itself. Our service was based on an exciting new NoSQL database called MongoDB because we believed MongoDB represented the natural successor to the traditional relational database as a general-purpose data store for software applications -- a prediction which has been playing out.

When building a REST API, it is important to choose a framework that will help you to work quickly and easily through the process. This can be impacted by the actual speed of the framework, but also by the amount of knowledge and documentation that exists so that you can spend less time working through roadblocks and more time working on critical components. In this post, we’ll be covering how to set up a simple API with full CRUD operations using the ever-popular Restify framework backed by a MongoDB Atlas database. For sake of simplicity, we’ll create a basic “to-do” style API.